State Street HQ | One Congress | Bulfinch Crossing | West End

RandomWalk said:
I assume they have an anchor tenant for the building if they’re making the shift. I have a few choice words for them.

I would rather HYM finish demolition on the garage and button up the site with a temporary park, to ride out the cycle until the market can absorb the planned hotel.
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No anchor tenant, from the article:

HYM plans to build the lab space “on spec,” or without a major tenant signed on, but O’Brien said lenders are more willing these days to finance such projects when they are focused on lab space. Hotels are difficult to finance after a ruinous year for the hospitality industry.
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While this updated proposal still contains ground floor retail, the initial renders look brutal. I hope there is some pushback that forces them to adjust.
 
You can't blame the developer for reacting to the changing market. I hope they change back to the 3 building plan. That would give 3 companies prominent naming rights on the greenway
 
BostonObserver said:
You can't blame the developer for reacting to the changing market. I hope they change back to the 3 building plan. That would give 3 companies prominent naming rights on the greenway
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I can tolerate it with marquee locally based companies like State Street and BCG but do we really need all sorts of tacky signage for every company that has even a modest operation here?
 
Here's hoping that the BPDA says no to this change.

Do lab tenants even want to be downtown?
 
JumboBuc said:
Here's hoping that the BPDA says no to this change.

Do lab tenants even want to be downtown?
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I hope there's substantial pushback from BPDA and a major shift back toward what was originally proposed. The approval of this overall development was based on public realm improvements contained in the phase in question. The Sudbury and One Congress towers' design validity in part rested on how the rest of the parcel was being dealt with. It's a pretty lousy system when a developer can cash out on part of a plan, then shirk other publicly beneficial aspects when it becomes inconvenient or less optimally profitable (though I know that happens all the time - albeit usually on a smaller scale). Come on BPDA, step up here.
 
^^ Exactly

The courtyard was designed to line up with canal st, creating a pedestrian corridor all the way from north station to the public market. Now theres going to be a huge lab building in the way. This is a HUGE loss. So is losing the sight line the gap created to see the custom house tower from canal st/hub on causeway. The pieces that were designed to benefit the public in a huge way get axed. Wtf!!


Tossing some retail in the base of this monstrosity does absolutely nothing to repair the massive loss of removing the public market connection/ped corridor either. It was designed the way it was on purpose after years of hashing out the design and one day they just scrap all of that and plop this down? Youve got to be kidding me. Something has to be done to stop this! They cant destroy this public space for pure profit alone.
 
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stick n move said:
Losing the courtyard that was designed to line up with canal st esp for future pedestrianization is a HUGE loss. So is the sight line the gap created to see the custom house tower from canal st/hub on causeway.
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you can type that as often as you want, but it doesnt make it accurate. the plaza still lines up with Canal St.
There just wouldnt be a building flanking the east side of it (which would have been built on top of the orange line and bus station).
 
real_EthanHunt said:
The plaza still lines up with Canal St.
There just wouldnt be a building flanking the east side of it (which would have been built on top of the orange line and bus station).
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Does it? I'm having a tough time picturing what the new proposal would look like. The pictures upthread don't really help.
 
RandomWalk said:
The currently approved plan brings the scale down to the finer-grained scale of the North End and the Bulfinch Triangle. The proposed lab building is a slab that walls off the North End and Greenway from the rest of the project. The only reason to approve the change is to accept HYM’s money grab.
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Architecturally, the change is not great.

But, this could also be the only pragmatic solution, or perhaps wait a decade for a different real estate market. Right now new hotels and commercial are hard to finance (HYM got the tower underway before COVID hit). This plot could just sit there as garage rubble if there is not a change of programming. Life Sciences gets financed today.
 
JeffDowntown said:
...But, this could also be the only pragmatic solution, or perhaps wait a decade for a different real estate market. Right now new hotels and commercial are hard to finance (HYM got the tower underway before COVID hit). This plot could just sit there as garage rubble if there is not a change of programming. Life Sciences gets financed today.
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Agreed, but the shift to life sciences isn't what bugs me. It's that a lot of effort (and narrative) went into the earlier cohesive design. And now this looks like a haphazard pivot from a design standpoint. What I mean is: why the big monolithic lab block - is it really impossible to do "marquee retail" (that was their wording in the original design, I believe), great park/plaza space, and even a small(er) hotel or small(er) residential (or something else...like how about that Boston history museum that was floated for the Greenway in the past) anchored around a lab instead of the prior cluster? To me the issue isn't the (somewhat expected) lab pivot, but throwing out a lot of the rest of the design for this side of the garage (because "building over a subway and bus station is hard"...as if it wasn't hard before). If labs are today's moneymakers, then keep a top quality design and anchor it around a lab. Put simply: this feels like reactive design that puts non-tenant stakeholders on the back burner compared to the original design. I am not ready to believe that labs must only reside in spaces that must suck for everyone other than the bench scientists.
 
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JeffDowntown said:
Architecturally, the change is not great.

But, this could also be the only pragmatic solution, or perhaps wait a decade for a different real estate market. Right now new hotels and commercial are hard to finance (HYM got the tower underway before COVID hit). This plot could just sit there as garage rubble if there is not a change of programming. Life Sciences gets financed today.
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Precisely. Look at San Francisco, a real estate cousin of Boston.
A new CNBC report on how much money San Francisco tech companies are blowing on empty office space since the start of the pandemic puts the staggering dollar totals into context. ...., Dropbox has bled $416 million during this period that included 2020, and the first quarter of 2021 according to their company's filings. Salesforce has lost $216 million in the same period,
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Speaking to commercial real estate firm T3 Advisors co-founder Mark Cote, CNBC says that “companies paying $90 a square foot may offer subleases for $20 to $25 less and eat the difference.”
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The SF office vacancy rate is currently 18.6%, compared to 6% pre-pandemic, but that figure is misleading. It only counts office space that is currently not rented out at all,
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https://sfist.com/2021/05/14/sf-tec...s-of-millions-on-office-space-they-cant-rent/

What O'Brien is saying is that he cannot get financing for commercial office space on spec, particularly given the huge amount of space in One Congress that has not yet been leased. He can get financing for a lab building on spec.

Who thinks that once its re-approved, that Prudential / Chiofaro are going to build Pinnacle, with its 538,000 gsf of commercial office, space on spec?
 
stellarfun said:
Precisely. Look at San Francisco, a real estate cousin of Boston.
...
What O'Brien is saying is that he cannot get financing for commercial office space on spec, particularly given the huge amount of space in One Congress that has not yet been leased. He can get financing for a lab building on spec.

Who thinks that once its re-approved, that Prudential / Chiofaro are going to build Pinnacle, with its 538,000 gsf of commercial office, space on spec?
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I don't doubt O'Brien couldn't get financing for the original design on-spec. But that doesn't mean that lab architecture needs to be shitty. HYM tossed in a quick back-of-napkin design to keep momentum going on this, simple as that. If labs are going to be downtown, we should demand good design that also effectively engages with street level and includes a welcoming public realm, just as we would with any other buildings. This present era can be an opportunity to redefine what lab architecture can be - whenever else in our history has so much money been thrown at urban lab buildings?

Regarding office financing: of course typical lenders are running away now. It remains to be seen how much of an urban office exodus there really will be though (I'm not saying there won't be some). First off, we are no where near any sort of behavioral equilibrium in terms of what most companies will really be doing in the long haul; for instance, even if companies grant a ton more flexibility to on-site-based workers and substantially increase their fully-remote worker proportion, a) most tech companies were growing pre-covid, and b) most part-time-on-site workers are still demanding offices. People hate hot-desking, and whether one gets one's own 2-3 day a week desk space or not can be an employer distinguisher. Before you poke holes in my argument: the extent of my claim is that we don't yet know what this will settle out at in ~2 years (I will agree it's highly unlikely a ~500k gsf office will get financed in the interim).

Regarding companies crying in their quarterly reports that they wasted money due to extenuating circumstances, and were willing to eat big loses on subleases: seriously, this is always how public company reporting will work. Companies simply cannot resist pointing to -$500m and saying "look, our numbers would have been so much better if not for ____". That's investor relations behavior 101. Also, companies cannot resist making overall numbers look somewhat better through stop-the-bleeding subleases...it's like saying: you're forced to work remote anyway, would you or would you not like an extra $10m? There's no way the recent corporate reporting was going to be anything other than what we're seeing; it has nothing to do with where offices are headed in the future.
 
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The architecture is terrible. But the program demands that.

But in the New Office Thread, there's a Bisnow article, that I can't read, but the headline suggested there's a record number of office SF being pursuited by companies in Boston. Does that include lab space? If not, it's hard to believe they can't get financing for a low-rise boutique office building. On the hotel front, I would agree it's hard to get financing in place currently, but when I tossed that idea out there in another thread, the thought of banks not investing in hotels seemed ignorant to some.

A tough decision for HYM to make, but also, the architect could have designed something much much better - at least something that responds to its surroundings.
 
Part of the 'problem' may be that Pelli has no lab buildings in its project portfolio, so this design looks as if they took the Red Line, got off at Kendall, and looked around.

Yale-ERB-1004-mod-2.jpg


^^ This is a PCP-designed engineering building at Yale, that looks to have a similar footprint. Much more thought went into this.
 
stellarfun said:
Part of the 'problem' may be that Pelli has no lab buildings in its project portfolio, so this design looks as if they took the Red Line, got off at Kendall, and looked around.

Yale-ERB-1004-mod-2.jpg


^^ This is a PCP-designed engineering building at Yale, that looks to have a similar footprint. Much more thought went into this.
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Are we sure PCP did this part? They didn't do the Sudbury.
 
real_EthanHunt said:
The plaza still lines up with Canal St.
There just wouldnt be a building flanking the east side of it (which would have been built on top of the orange line and bus station).
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I think youre right. In the globe article they do note that the plaza remains but it doesnt say if the plaza continues on as a ped corridor towards the public market or is just a general scaped plaza/park. Either way its no longer an enclosed retail corridor. At first glance the render appears to show a park with multiple obstructions in the way of a corridor, but if you zoom in and look to the right of the park there appears to be a straight shot from the canal st side to the public market side under the awning. I hope that is the case as much of a downgrade as it is. I guess well just have to deal with whats essentially a huge sidewalk/bus terminal/micro park combo instead of a dedicated enclosed ped corridor flanked by retail and separated from the bus terminal from before. Definitely a pretty big downgrade.
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Going off the old renders Im guessing the shape of the new tower should be something like this, with the dog leg feeding everyone towards the blackstone st sidewalk. Youll still be able to get to congress st from the canal extension, but its much more clunky now having only the thin sidewalk and having to essentially double back around the corner.


If theyre definitely going with this hopefully we can get another revision of the building that better matches the original concept and gets along better with the rest of the project so far. Maybe they could include a pass through at ground level so we dont lose the equal access to congress st from the canal extension. Also I know the article mentioned its too hard to build a large building across from the lab, but I dont see why a simple 1 or 2 story retail building couldnt be used to enclose the space in from the busy/smoky bus terminal.
 
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